In the field of document processing, characters are sometimes printed in magnetic ink. One such example is the printing of MICR characters on the bottom of checks. When processing documents it is often desirable to extract information from the documents so that the information can be retrieved during subsequent processing of the documents. Therefore, in certain applications it is desirable to read the characters that are printed in magnetic ink when processing the documents.
One of the shortcomings of the known methods of reading magnetic ink characters is that the read rates are not high enough for certain applications. For instance, although the typical read rates are quite high (on the order of 95%), some applications require read rates as high as 99% or higher.